2010 Sandoz Conference, March 25-27

The 2010 Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Annual Conference will be held March 25-27th in Chadron, Nebraska. This years conference is titled "Son of the Gamblin' Man: Identity on the Plains." The Conference will focus on Sandoz's 1960 novel, Son of the Gamblin' Man, and will explore concealed and conflicted identities in the American West and law and life on the frontier. Accompanying the Conference, the Mari Sandoz Heritage Center will host a special exhibit of materials relating to artist Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad).

Recently Received: Work in Progress at The Backwaters Press

Greg Kosmicki writes that Nebraska based independent publisher, The Backwaters Press is planning several interesting projects for 2010. The press will publish new collections from 2009 Nebraska Arts Council Master Artist Award winners Marge Saiser and Brent Spencer. New titles are also in preparation from poets Roy Scheele, Linnea Johnson, Charles Fort, Brad Maxfield, Trevino Brings Plenty, Michelle Brooks-Love, Angela Kelly and Charles Gillespie. The Press is also working on:

Letters from Grass Country--"a collection of essays about poets from the Great Plains, edited by Mary K. Stillwell and Greg Kosmicki."

Lost Originals--"a collection of Greg Kuzma poems that have not appeared in book form, edited by Kathleen Cain and Greg Kosmicki."

Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, edited by Christopher Buckley and Chris Howell.

Natural Theologies: Essays about Literature of the New Middle West, by Denise Low, past Poet Laureate of Kansas.

Talking Out of Turn: Poetry by Nebraska Women, edited by Sarah Mason, Heidi Hermanson, Liz Kay and Jen Lambert.

It looks like there is a lot to look forward to this year!

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Postscript: Backwaters Press has announced that it will be accepting submissions for The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets through December of 2010, for publication in Spring, 2012. Contributors must be women born or currently living in Nebraska, or have previously lived in Nebraska for more than a decade. More submission guidelines on the Backwaters Press homepage, at the link above.

February 3, 2010--Lunch at the Library with Kwakiutl Dreher

Dr. Kwakiutl Dreher will present the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association's February Lunch at the Library Program. Dr. Dreher is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches English and Ethnic Studies. Her interests include African American literature, and film and visual culture. She is also a writer and performer who has presented her own plays and musicals in a variety of venues from Georgia to California. Locally, she has served on the Lincoln Community Playhouse Reading Committee, on the Lincoln Arts Council, and as Editor of the NAACP-Lincoln Branch newsletter. Her numerous articles explore the roles of African American women in literature and the cinema. Her recent book Dancing on the White Page (SUNY Press, 2008) examines popular autobiographies of six well known black women entertainers.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on February 3rd, in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. We look forward to an exciting presentation from Dr. Dreher.

The Loren Eiseley Society donates Robert G. Franke's Eiseley Research Collection to the Heritage Room

Robert Franke had a strong interest in religious themes found in the essays and books of anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley. Franke was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Friends of Loren Eiseley, reorganized recently as The Loren Eiseley Society. The collection includes Franke’s publications, and his notes, proposals, and unpublished manuscripts for sermons, papers and books about Eiseley. Franke's research included numerous interviews and correspondence with Eiseley’s friends and colleagues. Of special interest are a seven page typescript by author Ray Bradbury, giving answers to Franke’s questions, correspondence with writer Annie Dillard and poet Howard Nemerov, and an extensive correspondence with Caroline Werkley, Eiseley’s secretary at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most of the documents in the research files were collected in 1981-1983, but there are later additions and documents overall date from 1959 to 1987. The collection is now in processing, and will be available soon.

The Franke Collection joins the Heritage Room's substantial collection of Eiseley materials, which, anchored by the Gale E. Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials, also includes books owned by Eiseley as a boy, the Nebraska Academy of Science Eiseley Donation, a Library Collection, and the Lazlo Kubinyi Collection of Eiseley Book Illustration.

Sunday, January 17th Ames Reading with Michael Forsberg

Nebraska native Michael Forsberg is a professional photographer whose work has appeared in National Wildlife, National Geographic, Audubon, and Natural History and in National Geographic and Smithsonian books. He is a charter member of the North American Nature Photographers Association and Fellow, International League of Conservation Photographers. His 2004 book, On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America has been called “the finest body of work on Sandhill cranes ever published.” His 2009 Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild, with additional text contributions from Ted Kooser, Dan O’Brien, and David Wishart is receiving rave reviews in the national press.

We welcome Michael Forsberg as our January, 2010 Ames Reader on Sunday, January 17 at 2:00 PM in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library.

New Titles: Getting acquainted with the Buffett family.

(This is the second in a series of posts about recent books about history and business in Nebraska.)

In the Spring of 1867, one Sidney Buffett left Long Island, New York, where his family had lived and worked since the 1600s, and took a train West to Omaha. There his maternal grandfather, George Homan, owner of a livery stable and operator of the local stage line, gave him work and introduced him to the local business community. Two years later, in 1869, Sidney Buffett opened a grocery store on south 14th Street in Omaha.

The Buffett grocery business would last through three generations and 100 years. It supported and often employed Sidney's progeny, a large, hard working, prosperous, civic-minded, politically involved Omaha family. The Buffetts, always proud of their grocery's pioneer status among Omaha businesses, built their understanding of what mattered in life from their experiences as tradesmen. If family came at the top of that list, success in business was right beside it. In trade, they could not affort to be profligate, or greedy, or to seem so. They were careful with their money. They valued hard work. They were reminded every day of the value of their connections with customers, employees and other businesses. Day by day, in small things as in large ones, they cultivated good relationships with others. They were intensely practical, and when they saw troubles ahead, they saved enough money to sustain their business in hard times. By this means, they grew their business through two terrible depressions, one in the 1890s and another in the 1930s. Buffett's lasted until 1969, and closed then only as regional chains and supplier combinations threatened their profitability.

Bill Buffett's book, Foods you will enjoy: The story of Buffett's Store. (Concord: Capital Offset Company, 2008) is the story of the Buffett's Omaha grocery business. The author is Sidney Buffett's great grandson. The book draws on the family's letters and photographs, on local museum collections and old newspapers, on reminiscences by several generations of the Buffetts themselves and by their former employees and customers, and on the author's collection of contemporary advertising materials. All in all, this is very rich source material. For many years, Buffett's store was a community institution in a way that businesses once were but no longer seem to be.

The history of the store is told in three dimensions. The first dimension is a narrative, following family memories, letters and local and business history. A second dimension is the inclusion of many telling excerpts of the source material itself, including letters, contemporary newspaper articles, business documents, and letters and later reminiscences by former employees and customers as well as by the Buffetts themselves. A third dimension is a graphic history, integrating photographs, period media reports, and period advertising materials. Some of the advertising is seen displayed in the store in period photographs, some is now reproduced in color to give the book a real graphic punch. In each of these three dimensions, the book is strikingly well conceived. Each of the three perspectives could almost carry the story by itself.

Librarians and scholars are sometimes unjustly skeptical of self-published works. Although this book would be considered self-published, it was professionally designed by Book Designer Rick Rawlins. Not surprisingly, it won an AIGA 2009 "Best of New England" Design award for its designer. Throughout, the book is a reminder that technology now makes it possible to create very high quality books whose expected publication runs are so small that previously, they could never have been published at all.

Some of the more memorable things about the book, for this reader, include: The character of Ernest Buffett, as it shines through in the business and family advice he wrote to his sons. The very different way people used to shop, with a clerk gathering individual items from a written list while the customer browsed.
Credit too was handled differently. Like one of the Buffetts' customers, in the midst of the Depression of the 1930s, my own grandmother bought the family house outright with cash borrowed at a grocery store, and paid it all back with interest in a year, along with her monthly grocery tab.

Not every Buffett went into the grocery trade. One of Sidney's grandsons, Howard Buffett, went off to college wanting to be a journalist. Marriage, and evidently, an effective admonition from his grocer father, led Howard to the more practical, better paying business of selling insurance. In time, Howard moved on to be a stockbroker, then Republican congressman from Omaha.

Howard's son, Warren Buffett, the investor, would become the most famous Buffett of all. Warren has said that his start in business came at Buffett's Store. For some months in 1943, Warren Buffett lived with and worked for his grandfather. In his own short contribution to this book Warren Buffett recalls that his job at the time was to take dictation from Ernest, who was writing a book whose title was to be "How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Have Learned About Fishing." Grandpa Buffett, Warren recalls, "considered these to be the only two subjects really worthy of commentary."

The author is an insightful historian. He remarks at the beginning of the book that nowdays he buys his toothpaste at a chain store with more than 5,700 outlets in the United States, and he recalls a time when he bought that toothpaste in a local one-of-a-kind drug store. His book seems to remind us of aspects of character and community that we still need, but find hard to sustain as arrangements of work and family life that built them fall by the wayside.

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This is Bill Buffett's second book. His first, also recently added to our collection, is a memoir of his mother, Katherine Armina Norris Buffett (June 13, 1906-August 17, 2004). Dear Katherine (Self published by Bill Buffett, 2005) is a family scrapbook. It combines Katherine's own memoir about her early life with family photographs, excerpts from letters she wrote and that others wrote to her, some of her recipes, poetry she cut from the newspaper, and so on. Scattered throughout the book are envelopes with onionskin sheets on which are printed the texts of various letters from people recalling Katherine or thanking her for some of the many things she did for others.

The book design is interesting. It evokes a family scrapbook with a precious archive of letters pressed between the pages, but the packets of onionskin letters are fragile, and in consequence the book will not stand up to use by many hands.

Like the later book, Dear Katherine succeeds in what it sets out to do. Katherine's warmth, generosity and sense of humor shine through. It is also an interesting portrait of a midwestern woman of her generation.


Almost all of the materials reflect Katherine's careful cultivation of the informal connections of kinship, friendship and community. These materials testify to the great value her generation placed on such connections, as well as to the way the women of that generation shaped their own lives in a time when the making of a healthy social world was largely women's work. The Foreword reveals the intensity of Katherine's attention to connection. Bill Buffett writes that in the last weeks of her life, when they had spoken openly about her dying, "She looked away, then at me and asked'How will we stay connected.' I assured her we would. This book is part of that effort."

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These books are quite interesting and are valuable entirely on their own. They have much to tell us about life and business and community over the past century. But it is probably inevitable that some readers will be mostly interested in the Warren Buffett connection. Alice Schroeder's thorough and much admired 2008 biography, The Snowball. Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, covers some of the same territory, and shows that Warren Buffett is a very complex character.

Taken together, these books reveal many common threads and shared understandings between Warren and the larger Buffett family. The most striking, for this reader, grows from the family's consciousness of the importance of connection, and their realism, judiciousness and generosity in building networks of business associates and friends. Whatever its other resources, genius needs a firm grip on reality to succeed, and in schooling their generations in the care of connections with their community, the Buffett family created a kind of 'Buffett brand' of realism that appears to survive in Warren Buffett's way of doing business.

Stephen Cloyd

Sunday, November 15th Ames Reading with Jeff Barnes

The Heritage Room welcomes Jeff Barnes as its November Ames Reader. Barnes has recently published his first book, Forts of the Northern Plains. In preparing this guide to the historic military posts of the Plains Indian wars, Barnes traveled some 13,000 miles to visit 51 historic sites making photographs, doing research and interviewing informants about the forts and their history. A freelance writer and fifth-generation Nebraskan Barnes has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. He is the past chairman of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission and former marketing director of the Durham Western Heritage Museum. We look forward to hearing about his adventures. The Reading will take place Sunday, November 15th at 2:00 PM in the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln.